The present invention relates to a linguistic coding system and keyboard therefor for use by people unable to use their own voices to create either synthetic speech or synthetic printed messages. More specifically, the present invention is related to a synthetic speech or printing device based on the sentence or message rather than the word, phoneme or letter.
Heretofore synthetic speech or typing devices have coding systems based on words, phonemes or letters which are implemented with keyboards with indicia thereon related to the word, phoneme or letter. These systems are very complicated to use because they require an extraordinarily large number of symbols or indicia in order to have the capability to generate entire sentences or plural sentence messages. This extraordinarily large number of keys and symbols makes it difficult to memorize the necessary relationships to generate a sentence and in addition requires an extremely large number of key actuations for a given sentence or message. Thus, not only is it difficult to teach an operator how to use one of these prior devices it takes entirely too long to generate sentences or other plural word messages making these prior art machines unsatisfactory for general use.